What We're Reading
1
Meghnad Bose. “‘Everything Is in Place to Start a Riot’: Joe Sacco.” Jamhoor, 4 June 2026.
In this conversation with Meghnad Bose, journalist Joe Sacco discusses The Once and Future Riot (2025)—his meticulous investigation on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and the enduring political afterlife of communal tensions. Combining eyewitness testimonies, documentary detail and comics reportage, Sacco's work asks how narrative forms shape memory and political responsibility in contested public spheres. The interview, occurring during Sacco’s May book tour, reflects on graphic reportage as a mode of witnessing violence, memory and resistance.
2
Hasan Fneich. “The Power of the (Poor) Image.” The Public Source, 13 May 2026.
Photographer Hasan Fneich reflects on the “poor image” through his experience of documenting war in Lebanon. Moving between personal testimony and visual theory, he considers how compressed, low-quality images become records of witnessing, survival and resistance, and carry traces of history even in moments of uncertainty and conflict. The piece situates the poor image within media economies and activist practices, proposing new ways to think about visibility and visual justice in wartime.
3
Gayle Sequeira. “Our Land Is a Damning Indictment of Indigenous Erasure.” The Polis Project, 2 June 2026.
Gayle Sequeira writes on Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s documentary Nuestra Tierra (Our Land, 2025), which follows the murder trial of Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar. Weaving courtroom footage, archival photographs and community testimony, the film exposes the long histories of land dispossession and erasure faced by Argentina’s Indigenous communities. The essay reads Martel’s work as an intervention that reveals the silent infrastructures of colonial violence and questions its reproduction and naturalisation by cultural institutions.
4
Joseph Bara. “Setting the Record Straight on Birsa Munda and His Political Legacy.” Economic and Political Weekly, 25 July 2020.
Joseph Bara revisits the life and political legacy of Birsa Munda (1875–1900) to examine how the Adivasi leader’s anti-colonial struggle has been remembered, appropriated and misunderstood over time. Drawing on primary documents and critical historiography, the essay reflects on questions of land, self-determination and social justice. It argues for a nuanced reading that recognises both the spiritual and political dimensions of his mobilisation, thus reconsidering Birsa’s enduring significance for Adivasi and other marginalised communities in India.
5
Anita Zhang. “Nepal’s rising ranks of women farmers.” Himal Southasian, 5 June, 2026
As men migrate abroad for work, women are increasingly sustaining Nepal’s agricultural economy. Exploring how shifting labour patterns, climate uncertainty and unequal land ownership are transforming rural life, Anita Zhang documents how women shoulder agricultural labour yet remain excluded from decision-making, land rights and climate funding. The piece highlights grassroots adaptation strategies, the limits of current reforms and the urgent need for gender-responsive climate policy that centeres women’s knowledge and secures access to resources and markets.
6
Arwa Damon. “An Afghan Woman’s Ascent of Everest.” New Lines Magazine, 22 May 2026.
Arwa Damon profiles River Ahmad, an Afghan climber attempting to become the first Afghan woman to summit Mount Everest. Moving between personal testimony and political reflection, the essay traces Ahmad’s journey from surviving a Taliban ambush to placing the ascent in the context of exile, gendered restrictions on mobility and the determination to create educational opportunities for girls in Afghanistan.
7
Martabel Wasserman. “Alcatraz as Image: The Trumpian Politics of Carceral Spectacle.” e-flux, Issue #164, June 2026.
Martabel Wasserman revisits Alcatraz as more than a former prison, tracing its intertwined histories of colonial expansion, incarceration, Indigenous resistance and visual culture. Beginning with the 1969 occupation by Indians of All Tribes, the essay examines how the island has been repeatedly mobilised as a political symbol and contested image. Moving between photography, the Empire and the prison-industrial complex, it asks what it means to reclaim Alcatraz from narratives of punishment and state power.
8
Lucky Issar. “India’s great men and the neglected women and homes that made them.” Himal Southasian, 16 June 2026.
Reviewing Gyanendra Pandey’s Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India (2025), Lucky Issar examines how the domestic sphere shaped the lives of some of India’s most celebrated writers, reformers and political figures. Reading their autobiographical accounts alongside those of the women who shared their homes, the essay reveals the gendered labour, silences and hierarchies that sustained male intellectual and political life while remaining largely absent from its histories.
9
Javed Gaya. “How was Urdu pushed out of public discourse? This book on India’s heartland traces the erasure.” Scroll.in, 23 June 2026
Drawing from his book Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India (2026), Javed Gaya traces the systematic marginalisation of Urdu in post-Independence North India. Situating language at the centre of debates around culture, citizenship and minority rights, the excerpt on Scroll.in examines how state policy, educational reform and linguistic nationalism contributed to the erosion of a shared literary and cultural inheritance.
10
The Editors. “Peer Pressures.” Parapraxis, June 2026
In the editorial for Parapraxis Issue 08, “Groups,” the editors reflect on psychoanalytic theory, histories of group analysis and twentieth-century socio-political movements to examine how groups can become sites of both domination and liberation. At a moment marked by political fragmentation and renewed struggles over solidarity, the essay argues for the continued necessity of collective forms while remaining attentive to the tensions, exclusions and negotiations they inevitably entail.
11
Zeyad el Nabolsy. “Patrice Lumumba in Gaza: The Readers of Nahdat Afriqiya.” Archive Stories, April 2026.
Drawing on the archives of Nahdat Afriqiya (Renaissance of Africa), Zeyad el Nabolsy traces unexpected histories of Afro-Arab solidarity in the 1950s and 1960s. Through readers’ letters—including those sent from Gaza—the essay explores how figures such as Patrice Lumumba came to embody shared anti-colonial aspirations, revealing the cultural and political networks that connected African liberation struggles with the Palestinian cause.
12
Aditya Bahl. “The Ghosts of Antonio Gramsci.” The Nation, 3 June 2026.
Reviewing Andy Merrifield’s Roses for Gramsci (2025), Aditya Bahl considers how the Italian thinker’s life and legacy continues to animate political and intellectual debates across generations. Moving between biography, travel writing and political reflection, the book revisits Gramsci’s enduring influence while asking what his ideas—on hegemony, intellectual labour and the “southern question”—might mean in a world shaped by new forms of inequality, migration and dispossession.
